Jonathan Davidson took over Juniper campus and data center switching when the two previously separate business units were combined following the departure of founding engineer R.K. Anand. Davidson has a service provider routing background at Juniper and Cisco, which is no coincidence -- after five years in switching, Juniper has been unable to mirror the success it had in its first five years in service provider routing. But it did start from zero and surpassed at least six other incumbent vendors to attain the No. 3 position in the market. The company has more than 20,000 switching customers cultivated through organic development, Davidson notes. And as Juniper moves forward amid a forklift upgrade facing its EX core switch base and after an initial misfire on the QFabric data center switch, it's focusing on customer demands for simplification, agility and automation. Davidson discussed some recent and future developments in Juniper enterprise switching.

Why did Juniper combine the data center and campus units?

When you're fundamentally trying to change an industry that hadn't changed in over 15 years or longer, you need to make sure you have a high performance team together, you need to make sure they're not distracted. So we created a business unit that was targeted for fundamentally disrupting the data center space, and that was our QFabric solution. But once you actually have that product out into the market, you actually get to a point where you want to find more synergies between these different organizations. We wanted to make sure that we were able to leverage the best of the EX product portfolio as well as the innovation we saw and continue to see in the QFabric portfolio. In bringing them together, we are able to leverage the best from both, and really enable our customers to have more choice.

But aren't the needs of the campus and data center drastically different?

If you look at the fundamental building blocks for technology and how we view things, I'm going to have to switch a Layer 2 packet whether I am in the data center or campus environment. So why have two different stacks of technology that are going to do almost the same thing? You're right in that there are unique requirements to both; that's how you actually package the systems together. Whether traffic runs East/West or North/South depends more on the construct of the system rather than the underlying technology. Many customers use the same core switching platform for both their data center and campus environment. That's why customers have embraced our Virtual Chassis technology. They'll use the same Virtual Chassis in the campus and data center.

So will EX and QFabric eventually share the same ASIC and code base?

Whether you use an EX platform or a QFabric platform, it's running Junos. It's about simplifying the operations for our customers and that can happen across either one of the architectures or platforms or products our customers decide to go with. We fundamentally believe that if you look out five to 10 years from now, we call it the Path to Flat. We truly believe almost every data center is going to be a flat data center. We've translated flat to mean fabric. Any-to-any connectivity in the data center is important. If you truly have a flat network, you can have deterministic latency. In simplifying the Path to Flat, one of the things we're going to start to do is actually bring these two technologies together. So one of the things we're going to start talking to our customers about here pretty shortly -- we haven't gone broadly with this yet -- we're going to take that Virtual Chassis technology that tens of thousands of customers have deployed and put that onto our QFX top-of-rack switches.

What it means is, I can start with a QFX ToR, have QFX at the top-of-rack and aggregation layer, and run that entire thing in a Virtual Chassis-based network. If I decide that I want to go even more flat, I don't need to throw any boxes out, I don't need to re-cable; I simply need to change the software and the configuration and actually add the QFabric Director and then I have a completely flat network and a centralized point of management, and I am able to grow from a few dozen 10G ports up to 6,000 10G ports without having to rip and replace any portions of my network, or re-cable.

If you have our Microfabric [the QFabric 3000-M Interconnect], you are able to go from zero to 768 10G ports, the QFX can act as the interconnect as well, and you can grow with that. We think that the interconnect is something that's a critical component and the [Broadcom] silicon family that we're using today will be able to continue into the future. We will use the most advantageous silicon for our customers. What's important to them is simplicity. But at the end of the day, 98% of our customers don't care what silicon is in the platform. They want to make sure that we're meeting their requirements or making sure that it's simple for them to use, and that they get the right price and performance.

What's selling more or in greater demand: the QFabric 3000-G Interconnect or the 3000-M?

One of the things that we have found is Juniper always tackles the hardest problems first. And I think it always doesn't get the credit for doing that. Solving the hardest problems isn't necessarily solving the sexy problems. When we go out and try to fundamentally change the way data center networks have been built for the past two decades, we came out with our QFabric single tier solution. And we decided to come out with a solution that scaled to over 6,000 10G ports in a single fabric. We could have easily come out with the smaller fabric first. But when you start to look at the logical scale issues, the issues that have to do with keeping 128 nodes all in sync at the same time ... if you solved for the small problem first you would have run into scaling incrementalism over time, and it would have taken us a much, much longer time to get to the scale that's necessary. That's one of the fundamental reasons we haven't seen any other vendor in our space come out with anything that looks remotely like this. The problem that we solved was a hard one.

Multichassis is pretty hard to do. Think of QFabric as a 128-node multichassis system that acts as a common, single fabric. That's the scale of the problem that we solved, and when you look at what QFabric actually did, all of the components and what it looks like, I'll call SDN Version 1. You have an external director controlling the various nodes; you have an interconnect that it can control as well; and you can provision everything through a single point of management, with an out-of-band control plane. When we started building this there was no term called SDN. We solved the problem internally with all open, standards-based protocols. We use BGP to communicate inside of the fabric. SDN Version 2 from Juniper is going to be a combination of SDN Version 1 plus some of the things Bob Muglia mentioned around 6-4-1 and obviously the Contrail controller is going to be a big portion of how all of this fits together into what I call SDN Version 2.

What about OpenDaylight?

We also realize it's an ecosystem of players and customers are going to want to have choice. It's important that we work closely with industry leaders like VMware, not only on their hypervisors and virtualization technologies, but also where they're going. It's important that we work with Daylight. And it's also critically important that we work with other third parties to actually make sure that we have the right ecosystem partners around that. We are a big believer in that the data center space is an ecosystem play. And if we try and go it by ourselves, we will not be as successful as we would be if we partner very tightly. The market has clearly told us that OpenStack is important; that VMware is important; that Daylight is important; and I think there will be a few other players that come out and tell us that that's important.

Which way do you point an SDN customer when you have SDN Version 1, Version 2 and OpenDaylight?

From a customer perspective there's not a whole lot of confusion. If I am a customer that is a VMware shop, more than likely I'm going to want to stick with the VMware path. As a networking vendor, all of our components must seamlessly integrate into that environment. Because I want to make sure that my applications are resilient, I want to make sure they're secure, I want to make sure that my applications can communicate with each other. So I don't think there's any confusion from that customer perspective. Infrastructure as a service is a different model. Many of them are VMware customers but a lot of them are looking to go down the OpenStack path. Through OpenStack, they can go down the Juniper/Contrail path, or OpenDaylight ... that's going to be a customer-by-customer decision. The key thing for us is to make sure that they understand what their options are and what they have available to them.

Why would a customer opt for Daylight over Contrail, and vice versa?

Once we know what Daylight is from a product perspective, I'll be able to answer that question. But it's still early and I think the targeted customer for Daylight is still new. Once the product exists there'll be inherent benefits to each one.

What's the SDN strategy for the rest of the EX portfolio?

We can put any of the EX9200 control plane protocols across our entire portfolio. You can change the data plane protocol as well (on the EX9200) because of how programmable the chip itself is. We will support OpenFlow on that product as well as other protocols I'm not ready to discuss today. So from a control plane perspective, we're set. From a data plane perspective some of (EX switches) require simply new chipsets in order for us to go and do that. But over time you're going to see more and more consistency across the switching portfolio as we continue to leverage the best of both worlds, both the EX9200 with Virtual Chassis on the EX side, as well as across the QFabric portfolio. A good example of that is Puppet, which is an automation tool predominantly used from a server admin, sys admin perspective. But the biggest pain point many of our network operations people feel in the data center is because the server people have virtualization, sys admins are able to fire up a new compute in seconds or minutes, a new application is seconds ... but then they have to go and file a network trouble ticket to get the network VLAN created. We've been able to put Puppet not only on QFabric, QFX, EX the entire portfolio -- that's a powerful thing.

In introducing data plane programmability on the EX line, does that imply sharing the same silicon stream as the EX9200?

That's something we're not prepared to talk about today. But you can rest assured that we are going to make sure that our fundamental goals of simplicity and automation are things we are going to continue to focus on for our key customers.

How's the reaction been among your EX8200 base to the EX9200?

It's actually been quite positive. They love the Virtual Chassis aspects of things. They love the fact that they are able to have one common core from the campus to the data center. Manageability ... doesn't change in any way, shape or form for them with the EX9200.

What's the migration or trade-in program you have for those customers?

We are going through and reaching out to our EX8200 customers and making sure they understand where we are going, make sure they understand what the platform is and what they're going to get out of the EX8200 over the next five to 10 years. And with that comes the conversation of, is there even a need to make a transition. Most of the time there isn't a need to make a transition. Most of them are quite happy with what they have today. But for those customers who would like to transfer to something that is newer and more programmable, we'll certainly make sure that the transition is a seamless one for them.

Do you expect to retain all of your EX8200 base as they make that transition, or do you expect to lose some of your customers to your competitors?

For those customers who do want to make any transition we certainly expect to make sure that they stick with the EX portfolio. We think that it offers significant benefits for them; they think that it offers significant benefits for them. And the growth that we've experienced in that market we expect to continue as well with the 8200 and the 9200.

Are you offering an even-up trade-in program for the 9200?

None of the incentives we're sharing publicly. We are sharing them with our customer base -- none that we're sharing outside of that customer base.